Worst Appliance I've Ever Owned
Pros:
Looks good, hidden controls
Cons:
Doesn't clean dishes, noisy, terrible racks
The Bottom Line:
Avoid KitchenAid at all costs.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
The only good thing I can say about KitchenAid is that their customer service wouldn’t return the phone calls from our appliance retailer either. Our retailer finally got tired of listening to us complain and gave us a full refund, one year after purchase. We’ve now installed a Miele dishwasher and wow, what a difference. We ran it last night for the first time, and for the first time in a year didn’t have to turn up the television while our dishwasher ran (TV is 37 feet away from the dishwasher). We ran an economy setting on the Miele (no pre-wash) and it cleaned the dishes 100% better than the KitchenAid did on its most intense cycle.
The appliance installer who installed the Miele took one look at the KitchenAid and said “You wouldn’t believe how many new KitchenAid dishwashers I’ve removed and replaced with something else in the past year.” When I quizzed him on this, he replied that people buy KitchenAid and use it for a week, at which point he gets the panic phone call – “come and get this piece of junk out of my house”. I didn’t get an exact count of how many dishwashers he’d replaced, but it sounded like it was more than a dozen from the way he talked.
Racks
The racks are useless.
The back row of the bottom rack is completely useless. Small plates will fit, and sometimes not fall over when you roll the rack in. Bowls of any size generally don’t fit. When you flip up the adjustable rack, some large bowls will fit if they are just the right size, but otherwise not.
The top rack is worse. The levers for adjusting the height are obtrusive, so you loose about 3 inches of space on each side of the rack (if you put a cup in, it just falls over). The tines in the middle of the rack have a bend in them. I’m not sure why. We try to put shallow soup bowls up here, and they do fit, but when you roll the rack in the vibration makes them all fall over. You can only use every second tine otherwise they stack too close together and nothing gets clean.
The cutlery rack is also useless. First, it’s too small. We always have cutlery left over that won’t fit when we run the dishwasher. Second, the two compartments at the front of the rack for serving spoons and ladles will hold one or two each . If you put large items further back the wash arm hits them and stops spinning, and nothing gets clean.
Cleaning Ability
Simply put, the KitchenAid dishwasher doesn’t clean dishes! I kept it set on “Baked On Cookware” and sani-rinse but that doesn’t seem to help. If I pre-rinse the dishes (more or less clean them by hand) the dishwasher will get them clean, but if there’s anything more than light soil on the dishes chances are good that I’ll end up cleaning them by hand after they come out. Most of the time the dishes come out with a gray film on them, regardless of whether we’re using a drying agent.
Having a built in food disposer in your dishwasher doesn’t make any sense given that the dishes have to be washed by hand before being loaded in order to come out clean. I’d rather have clean dishes and have to clean a filter once in a while.
